The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  “Aye,” the boy said at once, anxious to get back and help her.

  “I’ll tell the woman,” Harrison said. He went into the kitchen house and told the old Negro there to let the fire be as it lay and to get a clean length of cloth and her herbs.

  Quickly she went out of the kitchen and to the slaves’ cabin, where she kicked pallets aside and into a far dark corner. Fate could barely see the pallets on the floor, the work clothes hanging on pegs, the gourds tied on the walls.

  He looked down into a gourd near the doorway and saw a dry, leafy substance, which he touched with his finger.

  “No, no,” the scrawny woman said, and charged toward him, shaking her head anxiously. “No.”

  He backed away, examining his fingers to see if they had been burned or hurt.

  “Leave the red alder be,” she said. Certain he was impressed by her, she went back to the far corner, where she began putting things into a shawl. “Them are red alder leaves.”

  Fate watched her, not wanting to be closer to her than he was, not wanting to go nearer that store of herbs, either, for with them and with her he associated pain and sickness and the mysterious attitude which was death, and with her, too, he associated spooks and witches and unnaturalness.

  When she approached the door, he backed off a ways. She came outside, the shawl tied with a big knot in her hand. She walked toward the stable, where Tinkler Harrison was saddling her a horse. “Air ye ready?” he called as she approached.

  She said nothing. In the kitchen she had been attentive to him, but now she was a person apart, equipped with her bag of cures for pain and trouble; she had taken on a different air. She was above him and apart from him; not a slave woman at all, but the healer.

  She mounted the horse, sat sidesaddle on it, the bag on her lap.

  “She won’t go to a birthing without going on a horse,” Harrison complained to Fate. “She gets so quare when she’s called on to heal or deliver that she don’t hear what’s said. You can wave your hand in front of her face, but if she don’t want to see it, she won’t, and there’s nothing to be done, for she’s the only one here abouts with power to heal.”

  She sat on the horse and seemed not to hear him. Harrison gave the reins to the boy and told him to lead the horse to the clearing, that he would be along directly. “These things always take longer’n the woman predicts,” he said.

  Fate ran part of the way. The horse jogged, and the old Negro didn’t tell him to go slower, not until they were halfway home. Then she almost fell off and awoke from the trance she was in. “Stop it, stop the horse,” she said.

  He stopped it, and he stood well away from her when he she got off, too.

  “I’m older’n you think,” she said, and sat down on a rock to rest.

  When she didn’t move for a long time, he said, “Mama needs help.”

  The old woman moaned to herself.

  “Ain’t ye coming?” he said.

  She moaned again.

  He licked his lips and studied about what to do. He thought about picking up a stick and hitting her with it, but he didn’t want to hurt her, or to delay her, either. “You tended many birthings?” he asked. He got no answer. “I help with the lambs sometimes,” he said. “We get twin lambs right often.”

  The old woman moaned. Maybe she didn’t hear, he thought, or maybe she was interested in something else. “Where did you learn medicine?” he asked her.

  She opened her eyes. She gazed at him as if out of a distant fog of thought. “Your grandmamma taught me,” she said. “Your grandmamma knew all the herbs in the woods, all the barks and roots and leaves, too.”

  The boy had never heard much about his grandmother, except that she was sickly. “Is Mama going to hurt?” he asked. He didn’t know how a baby was born. He knew about sheep and sows, and Mooney had told him the dog might bear soon, for he had bred her to the German’s dog. But the boy didn’t know about people.

  “She’ll pain,” the old woman said.

  “More’n a ewe?” he asked.

  “More. More than a mare.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because God twisted the woman. Don’t you know that?”

  “No’m,” he said.

  “The devil come on her one evening and told her to eat of the fruit of a tree, and she done it, though God had told her not to, and God come down in a chariot and hitched it at the garden gate, and he strolled down the lane and found the woman naked with Adam, both without a stitch on and loving shamelessly, and he commenced to gather in his holy wrath, and he said to git, git out of this holy place, and he pointed at them and lightning struck from his fingers and thunder rolled and broke from his nose and mouth, and the man run, but the woman fell, and God went to her and said, ‘Eve, I’ve done twisted you up.’ It was like a stick had been poked into her body to rupture her. ‘It’s a reminder whenever you’re birthing,’ God told her. Then he went back to the gate, walking slow, pained to have seen such sin.”

  The boy couldn’t follow all of it, but it seemed like a firm truth. “Mama’s sin?” he asked.

  “Your mama suffers for it. Your grandmamma did, bless her sweet soul. God bless her,” she said fervently, “Jesus bless her.” She stared off, remembering then. “The pain’s as deep as God’s punishment,” she said.

  When they reached the house, he saw that Mina was there, and he felt better at once. She had been on her way home from Paul Larkins’ deserted cabin, where Jacob and his wife, Florence, had set up housekeeping, when she saw Mooney up by the lambing shed, clutching his hands and looking distraught. She had found Lorry sitting on a chair near the open doorway, a thick sweat on her face and an anxiousness about her.

  Mooney followed the Negro midwife indoors, but he came outside again directly, anxious to stand away from the pain, but not to leave altogether. He stood near the cabin door for a while and looked at Lorry with compassion, then critically studied the midwife, contemplated the seriousness of her, the way she had of looking at Lorry as if making an accusation against her, condemning her for the plight she was in.

  Fate understood that look better than Mooney, for the old woman had told him about what the pain meant, and why it had to be, about the fierce anger God had had one morning. He understood well enough, but he didn’t like her slowness. She had taken too long on the trail, and now that she had arrived, she didn’t tell Lorry what to do or what to expect. From her dirty shawl, she began to take out herbs, which she laid on one corner of the table. She took out a few pieces of roots, too, and a copy of the Bible, which was old and had pages folded and torn and torn out. She took out a sharp knife and wiped it on the skin of her forearm, cleaning it. She took out a length of linen string. She took out three pods of red pepper.

  Lorry sat by the fire, waiting. When she saw that the woman was ready, she rose. Her face got older and grayer as she stood there, her back to the door light.

  The old woman began mumbling. She knelt on the hearth, took water from the pot and poured it into a jug. She took the red peppers and broke them, then split them with her fingernail to free the seeds; she fed the seeds into the jug, then broke the pod skins into pieces and dropped them into the jug. She set the jug in among the hot coals, so that the brew could steep.

  She returned to the table, took one of the herbs and cut it with the knife into tiny parts and mashed them in her palm with the tip of the knife blade. Mumbling, she went to the fireplace once more and dropped the herb mash into the jar. She came back to the table and took up the closed Bible.

  It was then, after all this, that she told Lorry to go to the bed. Lorry sat down on the edge of it, sat there breathing deeply, as if the few steps of walking had caused her a loss of breath. Fate pressed himself back into a dark corner of the room and watched fearfully.

  Lorry threw the covers back from the bed and stretched out on the fresh straw matting.

  The midwife had opened the Bible and was reading from it, but she wasn’t reading, either, the boy knew
; she couldn’t read. She was reciting but not reading, and the words made no sense, but since the Bible was in her hands and open, the words she said took on the strength of the Bible and its history. She read and turned pages. Some of the pages were torn off at the top, but she didn’t seem to notice; she read where the page was gone, then her eyes would move on down to where the page was left.

  Lorry watched her, a sweat heavy on her face and body so that her dress clung to her. A pain gripped her and she moaned, and the midwife nodded heavily, accepting the sound as if she recognized it and had expected it, as if she had been reading about the sound in the Bible from that early page.

  Fate moved from the corner slowly and sought the ladder to the loft, for he could not stay there any longer. He didn’t want to leave his mother, but he needed the safety of his bed above. He needed that, the place he slept, but on the ladder he stopped. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her.

  Where was Mooney? he wondered. Where was Mina? Mina had been here and now was gone. Where was Ernest Plover? Where was his grandfather, or the new man, Jacob? Or his wife, Florence? Fate could run to Jacob’s house and ask him and Florence to come. He could be there, if he ran, in a few minutes, and they would come surely. But he would have to leave his mother.

  The midwife laid the open Bible on the table. She bent over it and touched it; then with trembling hands she tore off the top of a page. She balled it in her hand, touched it with bear grease from the slut on the table, moved to the fireplace and knelt down. She held the jug in her right hand and the ball of paper and Bible words in her left, and she put the ball in the ashes, set the jug down squarely on top of it, held it there, breathing deeply of the smoke that swelled up around it from the paper.

  Once the smoke stopped, she came back to the table, carrying the jar of tea. She poured some of it into a cup and sniffed the odor of it. She tasted it and her face wrinkle and her mouth pursed with sourness. She made a sound deep in her throat, then went to the bed and gave the cup to Lorry.

  Lorry drank what was there. It was bitter, Fate could tell from her expression. He wanted to go to her and throw himself on the bed and help her, do for her whatever he could, take for her whatever pain he could, drink the tea for her, bear for her whatever child needed to be born, save her from this midwifey creature.

  The old woman brought the cup back to the table. She drank the last scalding drops of it, and her loose mouth chomped against itself. She shook her head in the throes of its bitterness.

  Lorry moaned, and Fate watched as, under the dress, her body stiffened.

  “Air they hard yet?” the old lady asked.

  When the pain stopped, broke loose like a branch snaps on a dry tree, Lorry relaxed and nodded.

  “Sit up,” the old woman said.

  Lorry shook her head.

  “Sit up,” the midwife said firmly, irritated by the delay.

  “It’s not needed,” Lorry said.

  “I have a way I do. Sit up.”

  With a sigh, Lorry pulled herself up and sat with her back against the side of the cabin. She began to murmur a prayer, or a plea, Fate didn’t know, as the next pain increased inside her. Tears formed in her eyes; then her face seemed to freeze in place. The pain mounted and her body grew stiff and unyielding, sweat came out of the skin of her forehead and neck and throat, and the old woman behind the table leaned closer, closer as the pain mounted, murmuring, watching the pain as if the pain were sighted, could be seen walking toward her along the valley, as if the pain were coming to meet her from out of the garden, making the footprints God had made; the pain mounted as footsteps approach, the pain throbbed with the feet of old pages, with God’s words falling as footsteps, mounted to the present place, this cabin, came on as the old woman bent closer and closer, God arriving, listening, listening for what sound the boy did not know, came into the cabin—

  She screamed. Lorry screamed. She screamed and it dazed him, blinded him. He bolted forward, away from the wall, toward her, and it seemed he was fighting his way to her through a drifting stream that pulled him back and wanted to carry him to the wall again. He reached her and grasped her hand, and he felt then a heavy hand on his shoulder, and a hand on his chest, and caught a glimpse of the old woman as she pulled him away and forced him to the door, hurled him through it. Behind him the door slammed and the wooden poles slid into place.

  Fate saw Mooney standing in the yard near the lambing shed, staring at the cabin door. Mooney didn’t appear to notice him. He sat down on the ground near the cabin door; he was trembling so much he didn’t dare try to walk. He wanted to walk, to go get Jacob, but he couldn’t.

  Verlin stood nearby. Fate said, “Go get Jacob, why don’t ye?”

  “Mina’s gone to get him,” Verlin said.

  Fate closed his eyes tightly. Mina, he thought. Yes, Mina, hurry, hurry, Mina, hurry, he thought. He drew himself across the ground a ways, pulled himself away from the hated, closed door.

  Harrison came up through the clearing, leading his horse, walking slowly, his head lowered, as if he were humble. He tied the horse to a post and took a place near the door. He clasped his hands behind him, licked his lips to taste the sweat on them. He moved his feet to get a firm place to stand, and waited. After a while, when he heard no sound, he said, “How far’s she along?”

  Mooney said nothing, nor did he look at the man, but Fate spoke up, for his grandfather had been generous to help thus far and might be able to help now. “She screamed once,” he said, and looked up at him, hoping to see a sign that told him it was over, or that it was going properly.

  “Your mother’s strong,” Harrison said, “so she’ll more’n likely bear up all right, though the baby might not. Connie ain’t lost a mother in some years now. She lost a few women in Virginia when she got a notion in her head that they ought to sit up to bear.”

  “She—she’s sitting up,” Fate said.

  “No, no,” Harrison said easily, “she don’t use that style no more; that was what she done in Virginia, I told you.”

  Fate choked on his effort to speak. “She—she’s doing it now,” he said.

  Harrison squinted down at him, his eyes sharp and questioning. He saw that the boy was telling the truth. “Why, she shouldn’t be,” he said. “A birth is painful enough the other way.” He looked up at the doorway, as if remembering how painful a birth was, as if he had been carried back abruptly and set squarely in the midst of an experience he had gone through before. “Connie, open up the door,” he said suddenly. “Connie, you let her lie down.”

  The dog, tied at the back of the lambing shed, turned to the cabin now, sensing danger. It was not a danger she had known before. She could not smell it, she could not see it; she saw only the same cabin she lived in and knew was safe, but the danger was near, she knew that, and she howled suddenly, startlingly, in fear and frustration.

  The sheep moved anxiously about in the pen. The horse moved about in her stall. The cow watched with raised head from near the dogwood tree at the top of the clearing, not far from Imy’s grave, while the dog kept on howling.

  “Hush that dog,” a woman said.

  Fate’s confused mind cleared and he saw Mina coming up the spring path, hurrying, Jacob behind her, and Florence farther behind.

  “Hush that dog up, don’t just stand there like tree trunks,” Mina said, and Mooney came out of the stupor he was in and spoke sharply to the dog, and the dog stared at him, even more perplexed now than before. Mina moved past Fate and pounded on the door.

  There was no answer from inside. Mina turned to Mooney. “She won’t let me in.”

  Mooney frowned. “Damn her,” he said. He looked past Jacob to where Florence was coming along now. “Wait till she gets here,” he said.

  “Connie ain’t a bad midwife,” Harrison said apologetically.

  When Florence got to the yard, she stopped to get her breath, then pushed at the door to open it. She stepped back, surprised. “Shouldn’t lock a door on a birth,
” she said.

  “I told them to tell her to open it,” Mina said. She pounded on the door. “Two women is out here to get in,” she said. “You open this here door.”

  There was no answer.

  “Damn her,” Mooney said.

  Harrison spoke up, “Connie, open up the door.”

  “Connie,” Fate shouted. He felt a hand on his shoulder restraining him, and knew it was his grandfather’s.

  “You open this here door,” Harrison said.

  Mina knocked at the door, then struck it with the palm of her hand.

  “She’s in there,” Harrison said. “She wants to do it all herself. She’s as proud as a riding horse, and she’s old and set in her ways.” He looked sharply at the door and shouted, “Connie, open this here door!”

  There was no answer. Mooney moved to the door and kicked it. The door trembled in its bed, but it held. He had made it to hold against almost any blow. He kicked it again, then moved back from it and studied it. He looked up at the chimney, which was large enough to climb down; smoke was boiling from it. “If I have to knock that door in,” he said to Harrison, his voice trembling and dangerous, so that it chilled Fate to hear it, “I’m going to lash her.” He spoke loud enough for the midwife to hear him.

  There was no answer.

  He went to a pile of logs near the crib. He selected a log, pulled it toward the door. The dog began to howl again.

  Jacob took one end of the log and Mooney took the other. Harrison went to the door and pounded on it with his fist. “Connie, now you listen, you open up this door.”

  Fate stared at the door, awed that a woman could withstand so many orders.

  “They’re going to knock the door in,” Harrison said. He pounded on the door again, but there was no answer. He stepped back, wiping his brow with his hands. He shook his head wearily and got out of the way, and Jacob and Mooney moved toward the house, struck the door with the log. The door flew open, and in that instant Fate caught a glimpse of the old woman kneeling on the floor near the bed, her face held by her two hands. She was staring straight before her, and on the bed, open before her, was the Bible with the torn pages that she could not read. And he saw his mother on the bed, sitting there still, the wall of the cabin pressed against her back, stiff with pain.